TARGETING:...Brownsville Blogger Is "Dummy Of The Week"...Horse-Collars Aledo, Texas For No Reason...

 

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

BROWNSVILLE, Texas |...The dude just doesn't know football. That would be one Jim Barton, shown in photo above looking like Vince Lombardi. Well, no. But he tries once more to be the newsman he'll never be.

Barton is acting demographer in tearing down Aledo, Texas in his latest post, his unstructured mess couched in terms of the unbeaten, 11-time champion Aledo High Bearcats possibly being Brownsville Veterans Memorial High's next opponent for the state title if the local Chargers can get past favored Smithson Valley tomorrow night in Corpus Christi.

Talk about "targeting."

The 75-year-old Barton, owner of an unsightly Dairy Neck, has taken time to tell us what he thinks of tiny Aledo. It is racist, he just about says - this using only an anecdote from 30 years ago! Barton and wife Nenny, with son James, better known in Brownsville as Diego Lee Rot, lived up Aledo way and apparently received some communication from AISD to the effect that education for their son would be a bear in the Parker County town.

Who knows if young Barton attended school there (it's a wealthy community, and Jimmy does not say), or whether the kid graduated from high school or college. Dad Barton did NOT go or graduate from college, working mostly minimum wage jobs throughout his adult life.

At present, Jimmy is a house husband with wife support. She works; he does not.

What he doesn't say in his slam job is that Aledo, just west of Fort Worth, is much like other wealthy Dallas/Fort Worth towns that drew from White Flight out of Big D in the late 1970s and 1980s. Frisco grew that way, as did Plano and Southlake.

The Chargers (12-2) are focused on Smithson Valley (13-1), as they should be.

Old Man Barton as always gets ahead of himself, but that may be an age thing.

Why don't you tell us more? Tell us about how Aledo High has won 11 state championships (there has been only one in the Rio Grande Valley: Donna High in 1961) when its population is barely 5,000 (smaller than La Feria). That is some accomplishment, we would say.

It is a second-tier, Division 5A school and the Aledo Bearcats do not play powerhouse 6A teams such as Duncanville, DeSoto, Galena Park North Shore or even Austin Westlake. They are dominant in their own bracket, however.

And they do get the players, even as small as it is. Recruiting high school athletes is illegal, but somehow talented Black players end up playing for Aledo High. Former Texas Longhorns Running Back Jonathan Gray starred at Aledo, as did Jase McCallister, now at Alabama. Jobs for parents is what gets these superstar kids to Aledo.

There is a movement at the Texas Legislature on a Bill that would allow high school athletes to transfer from one school to another without violating University Interscholastic League (UIL) rules and regulations. It is, we're told, still in committee discussions.

Frankly, again I find Barton's cheap, shallow diatribe disturbing in that he merely hangs his story on the "class thing." It is as if he is envious of the Aledo model. The town is still so out of the metroplex way that it can exist on its own terms. A wife says, "Hon, your hands smell like pussy." No, he answers, "Horses". You move to small, outlier Aledo because you want to; it has little industry and remains largely a bedroom community for professionals earning their cash in the neighboring Big Cities.

What that has to do with high school football only small-minded Jimmy Barton knows.

I've been there, back when I was a student at UT-Arlington and, more recently, when we lived in Fort Worth and I wrote for D Magazine in Dallas.

We never, ever cease to be amazed at this untrained/uneducated blogger's take on the day's news. He seems to make it a game to go off the rails and type up some obtuse angle on the story of the day. That's the brain working, you know. What he doesn't get is that he forever misses the point of conveying useful information. For that failing, we point to his lack of a formal education.

And, yeah, we wonder what Jimmy Boy would have written about the geography setting home to Smithson Valley High.

That would have been better than a cowardly horse-collar tackle on Aledo...

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